In the UN Human Rights Council yesterday, the US was the only country to vote against a resolution supporting the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Forty-five countries voted in favor, none abstained.

National self-determination has been a fundamental US ideal from at least the early part of the Twentieth Century, being made famous by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. While actual American policy often strayed from that ideal, the US government always paid at least lip service to it.

Supporting the UNHRC resolution would not really have necessitated change in the status quo; it did not mean the actual termination of the Palestinians’ subordination to Israel. But the US could not bring itself to even vote in favor of this innocuous, symbolic measure.

The “no” vote is especially significant because the US professes to believe that the Palestinians should have their own state in a two-state solution. If the Palestinians are not allowed self-determination, then what type of state would they have? It would seem that the only type of “state” without self-determination would be one controlled by Israel—in short, it would be a puppet state. This is what the critics of Israel claim is Israel’s intention.

Certainly, “despite Washington’s much-hyped tiff with Tel Aviv,” the US vote showed that it would continue to fall lockstep in line with Israel. If the US dared not to offend Israel on this inconsequential matter, it is impossible to believe that it would ever take any real action to pressure Israel to allow for the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state.

PAY-BACK TIME: The conference room during the 13th session of the human rights council at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland

The UN Human Rights Council urged Tel Aviv on Wednesday to pay reparations to the Palestinian people for the loss and damage it inflicted on them during last year’s bloody invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Pakistan tabled the motion, which also suggested that the Red Cross should investigate Israel’s use of incendiary white phosphorus weapons during Operation Cast Lead.

It passed by a majority of 29 to five at the UNHRC heaquarters in Geneva, with 11 abstentions.

The resolution was opposed by the US, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

Britain, Belgium and France were among the countries that abstained.

The council approved four other resolutions on the conflict on Wednesday.

It voted nearly unanimously in favour of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, with 45 countries voting in favour and only the United States voting against. No countries chose to abstain.

A second resolution agreed to the creation of an independent committee to monitor compliance with the Goldstone Report’s call for both sides to hold independent transparent investigations into human rights abuses during the Gaza war and from Palestinian rocket attacks.

A third slammed Israel for targeting Palestinian civilians and systematically destroying their cultural heritage.

And a fourth condemned the Netanyahu administration for pressing on with illegal settlement construction, including in occupied east Jerusalem, calling for an end to the blockade of Gaza.

Despite Washington’s much-hyped tiff with Tel Aviv, the US stood behind Israel at Wednesday’s council meeting.

US ambassador Eileen Donahoe said: “We are deeply troubled to be presented once again with a slate of resolutions so replete with controversial elements and one-sided references that they shed no light and offer no redress for the real challenges in the region.”

Ms Donahoe insisted that her country supported a two-state solution even though it had opposed the resolution in support of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

PLO ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi pointed out that the two-state solution is predicated upon exactly that right.

The US was the only country at the United Nations Human Rights Council to vote against all three anti-Israel resolutions, which were approved Wednesday in Geneva.

It was also the only country to oppose a UNHRC resolution in support of the Palestinian right to self determination.

In the last weeks America’s relationship with Israel has been strained. But in Geneva, the US took the council to task for its treatment of Israel.

“We are deeply troubled to be presented once again with a slate of resolutions so replete with controversial elements and one sided references that they shed no light and offer no redress for the real challenges in the region,” said US Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe.

“The council is too often exploited as a platform from which to single out Israel, which undermines its credibility,” said Donahoe.

“The US strongly encourages the council to seek an alternative to highly politicized resolutions and a permanent agenda item focused on one country,” said Donahue.

She suggested that this issue was best addressed under “a robust common rubric.”

Both parties should examine their own human rights record, she said.

Her speech was delivered in advance of the vote on the resolution for the Palestinian right to self determination by the 47-member body.

Donahoe said that her country supported a two state solution even though it opposed the resolution.

But PLO Ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi said that there was no difference between belief in a two state solution and support for the Palestinian right to self determination.

The Palestinian people now live under “the yoke of unjust and bloody occupation,” said Khraishi.

He added that he hoped next year to pass a resolution that would allow Palestinians to excursive their right to a state.

On Wednesday, aside from giving its approval to Palestinian self determination, the council approved a resolution on human rights issues in what it called the “occupied Syrian Golan,” as well as two resolutions on Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Aharon Leshno Yaar said he appreciated the support of the US at the council. “We have witnessed today another anti-Israeli show,” he said.

Since its inception in 2006, most of the council’s resolutions which censure countries have dealt with Israel.

On Thursday the council is poised to approve a resolution which would create an independent committee to evaluate the compliance of both Israel and the Palestinians with the Goldstone Report.

Authored by South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the report asks both the Israelis and the Palestinians to hold independent investigations into their actions in Gaza around the time of Operation Cast Lead.

Former Obama Aide New Head of AIPAC

(Israelnationalnews.com) Lee “Rosy” Rosenberg, a jazz recording industry veteran capitalist who accompanied U.S. President Barack Obama on his campaign trip to Israel two years ago, takes over on Sunday as the new president of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rosenberg also served on the president’s national campaign finance committee.

The new AIPAC president hails from Chicago, the home state of President Obama, and also is on first-name terms with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior advisor.

Steve Rosen, a former 23-year, high-ranking AIPAC official, told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t think AIPAC has made any secret of the reality that his friendship with the president played a role in Rosy’s rise. He’s a guy who works very hard at fundraising [and] in the political arena. It was not as if he was plucked out of nowhere. He paid his dues. But I’m sure nobody was blind to the fact that he’s from Chicago.“

Rosenberg is known as an expert in bringing in big money from powerful people who generally are not outwardly committed to Israel.

AIPAC claims more than 100,000 members and is considered the most powerful Jewish lobby in Washington. It opens its annual three-day conference Sunday and will hear addresses from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their relationship has been sorely tested the past two weeks because of American and Arab opposition to Israel’s building for Jews in long-established Jewish neighborhoods in parts of Jerusalem that were resorted to Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967.

“The fact that he [Rosenberg] and the president have had a relationship helps now,” Illinois Democrat Rep. Mike Quigley told the Tribune.

Rosenberg’s ventures have included real estate, a music recording company, and high-tech startups and investing in jazz documentaries.

He replaces Michigan-based David Victor, who recently signed an AIPAC letter asking Congress to “demand” that the Obama administration “enforce existing sanctions law and impose crippling new sanctions on Iran.”

It might have seemed a no-brainer that the vital security interests of the United States would eventually trump the demands of a small client state that lately has not been much given to rational behavior. But in the latest showdown between the friends of Israel and the Obama Administration the President of the United States blinked first, demonstrating once and for all that no one in the US has the power to say no to Israel. And the truly amazing part was that the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was so confident of the outcome that it didn’t even bother to hide very much of what it was doing, hardly deigning to engage in its usual clandestine arm twisting and slipped under the door “position papers.” It immediately issued a public statement slamming the White House, asserting that “The Obama Administration’s recent statements regarding the US relationship with Israel are a matter of serious concern. AIPAC calls on the Administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State.” It then unleashed its friends in Congress and the media. Its brazen campaign against the American president was executed all out on public view, right up front and recorded on the AIPAC website.

Lest there be any confusion about what happened, the White House said “Thou shalt not” and Bibi Netanyahu responded “I shall” with Bibi left standing at the end. AIPAC managed to get the support of nearly every congressman who mattered, including many leaders from Obama’s own party. Half of the entire Congress attended the Monday evening gala dinner where Bibi Netanyahu was the guest speaker and there was what amounted to a bipartisan love fest when the Israeli Prime Minister visited Capitol Hill on the following day. Many legislators wrote statements affirming the US-Israeli relationship, carefully recorded by AIPAC in a 39-page document on its website. House Minority Leader John Boehner weighed in with a comment that might have been composed by a twelve year old, which means that he probably actually wrote it, and was echoed by Republican stalwarts Eric Cantor, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. Other commentary repeated the same themes: a threatening Iran, Palestinian intransigence, and Israel as a staunch ally. It all read as if from a script, suggesting a common source. Israel’s apologists never took Tel Aviv to task for anything, not even for being rude to the Vice President of the United States. Meanwhile the media was on board the trashing of the White House right from the start, supporting the perceived interests of a foreign country against those of the US. The Washington Post led the charge, calling on “expert” analysis of the situation from Elliot Abrams, Danielle Pletka, David Makovsky, Aaron David Miller, Daniel Curter, Martin Indyk, and Charles Krauthammer while excoriating the White House with its own lead editorials.

And this was in spite of the fact that opinion polls revealed that two-thirds of Americans were supporting the President, finally aware that far from a strategic asset, Israel is a strategic liability costing billions of dollars annually and has been so for years. And the Pentagon had even weighed in, for once telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth by saying that the fallout from Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians directly threatens US troops in the Middle East and Central Asia. But it wasn’t enough.

At the AIPAC conference on Monday, Hillary Clinton agreed to the terms of the final surrender by the United States, telling the assembled friends of Israel that American commitment to Tel Aviv is “rock solid, enduring, unwavering and forever.” Her entire speech portrayed Israelis and even the despicable Netanyahu in purely positive terms while blaming all violence in the region on the Arabs. She peppered her oration with commentary that is palpably ridiculous, like “The United States has long recognized that a strong and secure Israel is vital to our own strategic interests…And we firmly believe that when we strengthen Israel’s security, we strengthen America’s security.”

And there was little doubt about who the real enemy is, with Hillary Clinton using much of her speech to lambaste Hamas and Iran, calling for sanctions against the latter “that will bite.” And that little contretemps about settlements? Well, she delivered a mild rebuke and called for a two-state solution, stating that the status quo is not sustainable largely because of the demographic pressure caused by the Arab birth rate. But she put no teeth into her call for change and instead insisted that the disagreement with Netanyahu’s government was little more than a spat between friends that “exposes daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region could hope to exploit.” So you see, it was much ado about nothing and the allegations that the continuing conflict over Palestine is endangering American troops in the region is little more than an excuse for the nasty neighbors (i.e. non-Israelis) to make trouble.

Clinton did make one intriguing comment, perhaps not completely understanding the implications of what she was saying: “We cannot escape the impact of mass communications.” She meant that many people have now become concerned about what is going on in Israel and Palestine because of what appears on the internet. But if Israel were truly the cowboy in the white hat upholding truth and justice that would hardly matter, would it? In reality, the narrative of Israeli exceptionalism and entitlement that has been carefully shaped by the Israeli government and its friends in the mainstream media has been thoroughly discredited by alternative sources of information made available through the internet. Once upon a time, only a very narrow audience that could easily be dismissed as “kooks” was aware of the Israeli repression of the Palestinians because the news was carefully filtered, particularly in the US. Today anyone with a computer and interest in the subject can become well-informed very quickly. If there was one hopeful aspect of Hillary’s speech, that was it. The rest was depressing, scripted, and did absolutely nothing to address the real issues.

Vice President Biden followed up on Hillary’s performance by hosting Netanyahu for dinner Monday evening. The media reported that the gathering was intended “to salve hurt feelings” so one presumes Biden apologized effusively for offending his host two weeks before when he became angry over the 1600 new settlements. A misunderstanding, surely. And for all the groveling, guarantees of eternal friendship and continued largesse what did Bibi Netanyahu agree to in return apart from pledging to build more settlements and to retain all of Greater Jerusalem no matter what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Now that we have returned to the status quo ante of wag the dog, it is perhaps a good time to consider if anything positive has resulted from the American-Israeli crisis that never was. The disagreement revealed the utter impotence of the American government in dealing with Israel, even when national security issues are raised. For those who care about the future of the United States, it’s really past time to get hopping mad. The US government has effectively been held hostage to uncritically support a foreign government that engages in both apartheid and ethnic cleansing, something that few Americans would endorse if they were ever allowed a voice in shaping foreign policy. The presence of half of the US Congress at a dinner paying tribute to a foreign leader who is pursuing policies damaging to the United States is little more than a shameless spectacle, but no less than what we have come to expect from the Quislings on the Potomac. And then there is the fighting and dying in what is fashionably referred to as the “long war.” Israel and its lobby were undeniably significant players in contriving the case that led to war with Iraq. The propaganda spewed at the current AIPAC conference makes it equally clear that Israel and its supporters are the leading advocates of an attack on Iran and their victory over Obama will only embolden them. Israel can trigger a war by bombing Iran and provoking retaliation that will draw the United States in and there is nothing Washington can do to stop that. When war happens and the awful consequences become clear Obama and Hillary will wish that they had stood up to Israel and AIPAC this week and stopped the madness. But by then it will be too late.

Read more by Philip Giraldi
•Some Rogue Regimes Are Less Rogue Than Others – March 17th, 2010
•The Rogue Nation – March 10th, 2010
•Many Voices Calling for War with Iran – March 3rd, 2010
•What’s In a Name? – February 24th, 2010
•Some Straight Thinking About Iran – February 17th, 2010

So instead of curtailing US support to Israel (which was the primary motivation for 9/11 and the earlier attack on the WTC in 1993) we become even more like Israel instead:

Netanyahu disingenuously conveyed that US support of Israel had nothing to do with 9/11 and such when we were tragically attacked at the World Trade Center on 9/11 (and earlier in 1993 as well) because of US support of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinians as one can simply look up ‘Israel as a terrorist’s motivation’ in the index of James Bamford’s ‘A Pretext for War’ book and access the following URLs as well:

Once again I was able to get on a news panel on CRI-English (China Radio International’s English language station) dealing with the subject of the US-Israel relationship in light of the recent Biden affair.

The radio program was “Today on Beyond Beijing” hosted by Chris Gelken and Qinduo Xu. The specific discussion topic was: “US-Israel Relationship” The description of the program follows:

After describing Israel’s decision to defy US and world opposition and built 16-hundred new homes in East Jerusalem as an ‘insult” – Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said Israel’s actions were undermining Washington’s credibility as a peacemaker in the Middle East. Yesterday, however, Clinton said “America’s support for Israel was rock solid, unwavering, enduring, and forever” – words that will not be well-received in the Arab capitals of the Middle East.”

[Panelists]

Dr. Stephen Sniegoski, author “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel”

Dr. Li Guofu, researcher, China Institute of International Studies

Nir Grossman, Israeli representative to the Zionist Federation of the United Kingdom

Sniegoski Interview on RT America TV
Today (March 19), I was on RT America TV (Russia Today) briefly discussing the neocon role in the war on Iraq and the current Obama-Israel dispute. It is archived on RT America’s YouTube site. See:

March 20. 2010 “IsraelNN” Mar. 18, 2010 — U.S. Congressional lawmakers have flooded the White House and the media with letters and news releases complaining about the Obama administration’s unprecedented scolding of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. This, following an Israeli announcement last week that a routine housing project was proceeding apace in eastern Jerusalem.

Politicians from across the political spectrum called on President Barack Obama and his aides to tone down their attacks on Israel and start using a more even-handed approach when dealing with the Palestinian Authority.

Many pointed out the lopsided double standard used by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joseph Biden in harshly condemning Israel’s routine announcement of a zoning approval for new housing in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in northwestern (mistakenly called east by most of the media) Jerusalem – a three-year-old project.

Their criticism was delivered as the PA government dedicated a public square to the memory of a brutal murderer who in 1979 led the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, slaughtering 37 innocent civilians, including children.

Neither Biden nor Clinton came out with any public statement condemning the PA’s decision to go ahead with the ceremony naming a public square in the terrorist’s honor, nor the PA decision to follow up with a public study day in her memory two days later.

In a letter dated Wednesday, March 17, ten members of Congress told the president, “While your Administration clamors over the announcement of a proposed residential development years away from completion, Iran continues to develop its nuclear weapons capability and Hamas and Hizbullah rearm and reenergize. Remarks made by your Cabinet and advisors embolden Israel’s enemies – who are wholly committed to destroying the Jewish State – and undermine the critical relationship we have with our strongest ally for democracy and peace in the Middle East.”

Senator: Move US Embassy to Jerusalem
“It’s hard to see how spending a weekend condemning Israel for a zoning decision in its capital city amounts to a positive step towards peace,” U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) said dryly in a separate statement. “Rather than launching verbal attacks on our staunch ally and friend, it would be far more worthwhile for this Administration to expend the effort planning for the transfer of our embassy to Jerusalem and tackling the growing Iranian nuclear threat.”

U.S. Representative John Boozman (R-AR) went further, saying, “The Administration has lost focus on what has been the cornerstone of our foreign policy in the Middle East. We have an unbreakable bond with Israel, but the Administration is systematically eroding that relationship. The lack of clear objective and strategy by the Administration challenges and poses a security threat both in the Middle East as well as to our national security.”

In Obama’s own party, U.S. Representative Shelley Berkley (D-NV) sent out a particularly scathing statement about the Administration’s “irresponsible overreaction” to Israel’s Interior Ministry’s awkward timing of its zoning announcement, which Obama advisor David Axelrod termed an “insult” and an “affront.” Berkley noted, “No doubt the administration’s overwrought rhetoric is designed to try to appease Palestinian politicians and convince them the U.S. is an honest partner in the peace process by seizing every available opportunity to criticize the actions of our ally Israel.”

“That strategy also includes ignoring the myriad provocations by Palestinian leaders that make pursuing peace such a long and arduous process,” Berkley pointed out. “Where, I ask, was the Administration’s outrage over the arrest and month-long incarceration by Hamas of a British journalist who was investigating arms-smuggling into Gaza? Where was the outrage when the Palestinian Authority this week named a town square after a woman who helped carry out a massive terror attack against Israel? It has been the PA who has refused to participate in talks for over a year, not the government of Israel. Yet once again, no concern was lodged by the Administration. And, all the while, Hamas restocks its terror arsenal and fires rockets into Israel.”

Shelley added that the U.S. should be pursuing a process of fairness, “not a policy of constant appeasement and reinforcement of the Palestinians’ failings as legitimate partners in the peace process.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) published a complete list of the politicians who issued statements in support of Israel.